Flight Feathers

Re: Flight Feathers


You don't really have a grasp on the concept of evolution at all do you??



No thanks. If I want to associate with a bunch of nuts I'd go to the local asylum.

When the only shot there is at defending a theory is ad-hominems, it's basically time to find a new theory.

It wasn't an ad-hominem. It is fairly obvious from your choice of words that you don't comprehend the concept of evolution at all. If you did you'd realize how flawed your attempt is.

I would think it was pretty obvious. If it ended up on his **** he wouldn't be able to reproduce. Say one did have it on its wings and the other on its **** which do you think would survive as a species?

Next point. Say one has feathers on its wings only and the other has them on its legs only. Which is more likely to escape predators and survive?

When the mutation helps survival in a certain environment then the mutation survives. This is even more obvious than looking up churches in yellow pages.

This, I think, is the point he/she misses entirely about evolution.

Many people seem to think evolution is a process where something starts out as "A" and mutates into "B" which mutates into "C" and so on until it reaches an end-point of "Z". That may be a more ordely concept to understand but it doens't have much, if anything, to do with the theory of evolution.

There may be a few detours along the way (according to the BS theory) but, ultimately you have to get from A to Z or the whole thing is worthless.

In real life of course the fossil record shows no sequence of anything changing into anything else whatsoever, with or without detours. All it shows is, as Gould, Eldredge et. al. have noted, is abrupt formation of new kinds of animals with no antededants, and stasis.

Now, tell me again what it is that I don't know about evolution, and what anybody is supposed to see in your sophistry other than ad-hominems.

I told you. You just pretend I didn't.

Oh well. Its just too bad evolution doesn't work instantly like you demand then we wouldn't have to deal with people that can't see past their noses.

3 problems with this statement.
1. Not all creatures are in the fossil record. They can't be since most decay or are eaten by some other creature. If a creature developed feathers on its legs and was eaten by another creature than it wouldn't be in the fossil record but that wouldn't mean it never existed.

2.The fossil record only shows the fossils we have found. There are billions of fossils we have not yet found. Evidenced by the fact that we find new ones all the time.

3. Not all fossils are checked and catalogued to see if they vary slightly from other known fossil species. This would be a monumental task.

gunga, as we are here sitting , the gap of fossils that exhibit some of the "solutions" to flight, grows ever smaller.
Remember , the fossil record merely records the bones of a number of possible solutions to a problem. It does not (nor has anyone EVER suggested that it did) plow a linear groove of one fossil begatting another. If youve got that from anything I said, I assure you I meant no such thing.

To just use an ontogenetic recapitulation, think about the feather structures of buteos, raptors,hens, pelagics, etc. ALl these birds have young that are covered in whAT? DOWN, thats what. Then from out of the same follicles comes one of 6 different types of feathers that ornithologists have subclassed.A young eagle carries down and, as it grows its down is replaced by flight fethers and body feathers. ALL from the same follicles. So how can you play surprised when evolution of birds.
(spotty as bird fossils are, shows that feathers follow a path of development) Some of the flightless birds of today retain feathers that are structurally mixed, or dont contain asymmetric feathers at all

The 2001 discovery of the Iberieosornis from the early Cretaceous(when,it is speculated that the same lagoonal structures existed over Europe and were connected. Why is this important? well the various archeopterygian species were all found within the litho limestone of the Solnhofen Formation. The Iberieosornis was found from a formation A few tens of millions of years later and still part of a solnhofen type sectional rock.
Gauthier has subdivided bird-like and lizard bird like features that are connected by evolutionary cladistics. Archeopt... and Iberieosornis seem to form a neat intermediate clade that follows the development of form following function. While archeopteryx was a bird that could have flown, it wsnt equipped for flight and whereas Iberieosornis was, and still retained some srcheopteryx features (where archeop had teeth in a leathery like maxilla structure, Ibeieosornis had an acyual beak with tiny {probably vestigial} teeth
The feather structure is a (pardon my francais) "chicken ****" argument on your behalf gunga, when, If I were a devout Creationist, Id make a big rile about the quick development of the ulula bone and the quick loss of the bony tail.
There, Ive given ya something better to use next time ya want to try to impress us with your anti-evolutionist logic.

In the Jurrasic (and I hadda look this up in the treatiseon Paleo... volumes we have inCD Roms), all the featherd dinosaurs of the "coelosaurid theropods" show evidence of one of 4 types of feathers, these dinosaurs and dinosaur like birds were microraptor, Utahraptor,sinosauropteryx, sinornithosaurus,caudipteryx (3 species) beipiaosaurus, archeopteryx (7 apparent species) shuvuia. These showed variants of spicules, conical paplillae,barbs, barbules(just a barb with some chaos theory thrown in), and rachis (mandelbrot equations to the max).

But rather than sounding like a dictionary , just mull over the ontogentic points about how many bird species display different feather types on the same bird during their life and the pattern seems (ok maybe Im easy ) to follow the evolutionary trends from spicules to rachis feathers.

Look up alula bones and you can challenge the science for a few more years (maybe) until some fossil dig shows the intermediate from fingers on wings like archeopteryx to fully developed wings with alulas.

As far as Eldredge and Gould they arent the only word in town. There are a number of scientists who are questioning their conclusions. Remember Gould and Eldredge were working with Spirifers and other brachiopods.Resampling of Goulds own field areas has resulted in more complex clades than can be explained by saltation or punctuated equiibrium.


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http://www.science-frontiers.com/sf046/sf046p11.htm

So whats your point gunga? youre putting up stuff that is almost 20 years old. The really big bird finds (as well as 6 new archeopteryx specimens in the Solnhofen) have all been found in the late 1990s and into the new century.That article is from 1986, we must move on with our data and arguments
If you want to post old arguments ok, but please first look at what the recent evidence is before you land behind something. I dont hear anything from Hoyle and Wickramsinghe since they found all the new archeopteryx'es from like 93 on. Each one , found in a different mode of articulation,seems to me, merely supports the earlier structure as correct and certainly not a "fake".

And the fact that their big draggy tails on all the specimens dont appear all chewed up from dragging, they must have been able to keep them high and out of the way while running.Or maybe something else.

Some paleontologists said that Archeopteryx was more adapted to an aquatic environment. Ive not read any of the arguments but find the concept interesting because all the specimens have been found in this litho limestone which was a tidal lagoon environment.

PS,Hoyle was never an opponent of evolution, he just was a fan of "panspermia" in that the origin of life came from outer space. His hypothesis is based partly on the fact that glycine has been seen in the spectra of some star clusters

What I read (and what you observe in the statement by Corliss) is that there is a good deal of question regarding the authenticity of the Archaeopteryx, and that even if it is not an outright fake which is possible, it is a fully flying bird of some sort and not any sort of a halfway between velociraptors or coelurosaurs and birds. Granted it's not a MODERN bird, it's still a fully formed bird with wings and flight feathers.

yeh, its more bird than dinosaur.

But its got a little bit o dinosaur in it, no?

When that article was written (1986) there were only 2 specimens of archeopteryx known and one was ratty and not in fine grained sediment so its detail wasnt great. It did mirror the ...lithographica specimen. As time went on and all the shouts of fake became louder, more work in the solnhofen revealed more specimens. The number is about 8 now , so lest one gets too deeply commited to the concept that archeopteryx is a "fake", one should wAIT FOR THE EVIDENCE TO COME IN. Lately(in the last 10 years or so) the fake call has been quieted.
BUT, of late, Hoyles panspermia gets a lot of support from galactic spectral analyses. All of the nucleotides that occupy the "base pairs " (incuding uracil) have been found in intergalactic spectra and 2 of the 20 or so key proteins have also been found in outer space.
So, its possible that , somehow life, as a hitchhiker on a dirty piece of space rock "seeded" our planet with the ingredients of an RNA world way back in time and the resulting array of life goes back to those panspermia events.

Im not a denier nor a beleiver on this hypothesis . It could be real, or the spectra could be artifacts of the methods and equipment

As we were posting all this, last evening on the Science Channel there was an hour show devoted to the evolution of flight feathers. It was pretty much as I posted on 4/24.
They agreed that the progressive development of feathers on a young bird (from down or from a naked chick like the pigeon) feather development follows pretty much the same appearance in evolution.
The interesting thing is that some paleos have gone back and looked at some of their museum specimens and , based on the simple shaft through the complicated barbules, they could see that many earlier dinosaurs had feather shafts. The big surprise was that even T-rex apparently had feather shafts.

It wasnt much help for Creationites but it was rather informative about the very recent research that had provided a number of bird/dinosAURS AND DINOSAUR/BIRDS including a few more specimens of archeopteryx and sinosauropteryx.
There was no faking because they filmed the fossil beds and the collecting by the Chinese Geological Survey
Again the matrix was some very fine grained (micritic) limestones, almost lithographic quality rock.

One of the really interesting things was that 2 molecular Biologists at Planck Institute did a genetics experiment and traced the development of feathers in embryos. They used dye PCR segments and discerned that 2 genes were responsible for the development of feathers. It wasnt a modification of reptilian scales with the exception that one of the genes was respionsible for plate like scales on lizards and then, with the other gene turnng it off and on, the feather began to emerge right from the skin of the embryo. So there was a linkage between one of the genes and scales but feathers WERE NOT modified scales. They developed as a separate solution to possibly preserving body warmth as dinos became more and more endothermic. (Sort of like tuna)

You haven't really answered the question I asked, i.e. how do the flight feathers end up only on the wings where they are needed?

Evolution posits sequences of mutation and selection driving a gradual change from non-flying dinosaurs or whatever to flying birds. What sort of a gradualistic process of mutations will end up with the flight feathers only on the wings where they are needed, and not all over the creature's body??

Did somebody smear evo lotion just on the "proto-bird's" wings??

Nice High school pictures gunga? They yours?

As far as not answering the exact question youve asked, do a little reading of your own. If you are gonna be a Head-up-the-bum total -in denial sorta Creationist, Im sure youll think of something charmingly mythological drawn from your Mr Wizard text of the O and N Teastamentii. I am eager to hear your own scientific explanation.

I thought I answered this in a simple fashion that was easy to understand quite some time ago. Go back and read it. It's called "survival of the fittest".

That's basically an empty claim to have answered something.

Gunga, Im no expert on the subject of the evolution of the feather. However , having said that, the answer to the question you posed is not one of "incomplete evidence" its one of an overabundance of different theories.
In a previous thread either you or someone else posed a comment by Feduccia that made it appear that "Paleontologists are unclear about bird evolution " (AND, IMPLIED) "therefore evolution is in question and has lost ground". Im aware that this is the position which you hold. Therefore, the concept of the evolutio of feathers in their functional forms needs to be looked at in an overall picture. There are about 6 different kinds of feathers , some with a rachial symmetry (body feathers) and some with rachial asymmetry (flight feathers). The other feathers are down, filoplumes, bristles and other specific sensory forms. Fedducia and Dial , as well as Gauthier and others have tried to argue their points to make the cases that either birds arose from dinosaurs or that dinosaurs and birds split away from a common ancestor and evolved separately from the getgo.

So, we have feathered dinosaurs that, within the early Jurassic showed complex pennation (structure showing a rachis shaft) by the mid Jurassic we see fossils of bird like dinos and dino like birds. The bi5rds had body fethers with rachi. The next step, said Feduccia, is that the birds, with non specialized feathers began using their forearms (with non specialized feahers) to allow them better traction when they climbed up slopes. Feduccia uses some good arguments here because he tested little chicks and baby gfalliform birds as they ran up slopes. (Remember, all these birds have "down" on their bodies. They flapped their wings as they scampered up a slope and, Feduccia, using dynamometers could measure the minute weight forces on the slope boards. He stated that the feathers of a non flying bird , acted like a spoiler giving more downward force on the running chick.He hypothesized that such a mechanism would be "red queened" into a quick enforcing trait since predatory escape mechanisms are quickly enetred into the evolution genetic data base.
Dial and Milner have also shown that flightless birds (auks ostriches) have had their wing feathers degenerate into non specific forms (Im implying no cause and effect here just correlation)
They also have experimented on other galliforms ,(rails)who, although they fly, also use their wings in a separate motion type to run up hills employing their "spoiler"

The question is not cut and dry answered. There are many many trains of evidence leading us on to speculate and hypothesize. We may never ever kbow for sure why flight feathers and non specific feathers occupy different spots on the body , but from my above gleanings from the literature we can surely see that its been handled by nature in natures own crucible, and over expanses of time.
Your question was posed as a "Heres where I can stump the evolutionists".
I say, au contraire,instead of being unable to "prove" a point, we have multiple clutches of evidence that enable us to lay down a convincing forensic trail to an explanation that is satisfying and maybe even correct.
PS, where's some Creationist evidence?